Engaging Ideas - 11/4

A collection of recent stories and reports to make you think about how to make progress on divisive issues.

Every week we curate stories and reports on complex issues. This week: Articles on the effect scandals have on polling and what connecting research and policy can do to reduce inequality. A voter’s guide to the Nov. 8th education policy stakes. What 12 state schools are cutting, or creating, to ease cost burden on students. A look at an initiative on California’s ballot that may have important implications for drug pricing and policy nationwide.

Democracy

The
Case Against Democracy (The New Yorker)Caleb
Crain writes: If most voters are uninformed, who should make decisions about
the public’s welfare?

Accelerating
“What Works” (Stanford Social Innovation Review)There
is an urgent need to expand the infrastructure for results-based policymaking
at all levels of the US government.

Mass
media has utterly failed to convey the policy stakes in the election (Vox)Millions
of Americans would love some or all of these changes, and millions of others
would hate them. But most of all, the vast majority of Americans would simply
be confused. Someone who’d been following the election moderately closely —
scanning headlines, watching cable news, and tuning in to debates — would
simply have no idea that this sweeping shift in American public policy is in the
offing if Trump wins. Nor would they have any real sense of what the more
modest shift in public policy that would emerge from a Clinton win would look
like. Beneath the din of email coverage and the mountains of clichés about
populism, the mass-market media has simply failed to convey what’s actually at
stake in the election.

Public Opinion/ Polling

Scandals'
Impact on Polls: A User's Guide (RealClearPolitics)When
events like this happen, it’s often helpful to take a look at the basic
components of the race before getting too bogged down in the details. I
attempted to do that using a very simple model (described below) based on the idea
that the candidate who is disliked the least on a given day will probably have
a polling advantage. The model suggests that if this new email scandal drags
Clinton down in the way past controversies have, the race could end up being
very close. But if it doesn’t (or, again, if Clinton were to reveal damaging
information about Trump), she may maintain her polling advantage heading into
Election Day.

Opportunity

Does
the Economy Really Need to Keep Growing Quite So Much? (The
Atlantic)Some
economists are now challenging that view, arguing that it makes more sense to
focus on measures of well-being other than growth. After all, despite a growth
rate that has averaged three percent over the last 60 years (which is quite
robust), there are still 43 million Americans living in poverty, and most
people’s wages are essentially unchanged from the end of the Reagan
administration. In fact, the median income of households in 2014 was four
percent lower than it was in 2000, despite positive economic growth in all but
two of the years during that time period. For half a century, developed nations
have focused on how to make their economies grow faster, hoping that strong
growth would improve life for all its population. But what if growth isn’t the
key to raising the standard of living across a society?

Connecting
Research and Policy to Reduce Inequality (The Russell Sage Foundation
Journal of The Social Sciences)A
new article suggests that education researchers and policymakers need to
improve their communication with each other in order to reduce educational
inequality.

Community Engagement

Portugal
announces the world’s first nationwide participatory budget (The Huffington Post)Portugal
has announced the world’s first participatory budget on a national scale. The
project will let people submit ideas for what the government should spend its
money on, and then vote on which ideas are adopted. Although participatory
budgeting has become increasingly popular around the world in the past few
years, it has so far been confined to cities and regions, and no country that
we know of has attempted it nationwide. To reach as many people as possible,
Portugal is also examining another innovation: letting people cast their votes
via ATM machines.

Civic
Engagement Strongly Tied to Local News Habits (Pew Research Center)A
new study by Pew Research Center in association with the John S. and James L.
Knight Foundation reveals that, overall, the civically engaged are indeed more
likely than the less engaged to use and value local news.

K-12 Education

Education
Week's 2016 Voters' Guide (EdWeek)Voters
in a number of states are being asked to weigh in on education-related
initiatives and legislative referendums Nov. 8. Party control of the U.S.
Senate and House of Representatives will have implications for education in a
number of areas. Get a jump on the issues, candidate positions, and policy
stakes in the federal and state elections.

Lessons
Principals Can Learn From Their Staff (EdWeek)School
leaders must be open to learning lessons from the staff they oversee, rather
than just teaching them, writes Peter DeWitt. "Teachers and staff came to
me with articles and research. When I visited their classrooms every day I
learned new teaching strategies that I could use with other staff members. The
introduced me to new researchers and innovative ideas. They inspired me to
continue my lifelong learning."

The
lack of a child care ratings system leaves many parents in a bind. (NPR)About
20 states are "on their way," Hibbard says, having received federal
funding in 2011 to build a system to define, measure and improve quality. Some
states are working to create online tools based on standards suggested by the
federal Department of Health and Human Services. These standards are the basis
for a rating system HHS calls the Quality Rating and Improvement System.

Higher Education & Workforce Development

What 12
State Schools Are Cutting, or Creating (The New York Times)State
support for public two- and four-year colleges — funding is nearly $10 billion
below what it was just before the recession — has begun to recover, though
officials at the nation’s flagship universities say that doing more with less
is the new norm. Some are even finding fresh ways to ease the financial burden
on students.

Report:
Competency-Based Education in College Settings
(Mathematica Policy Research)Key
Findings: Consortium-wide, 35% of participants completed their program; their
employment rates started and remained high, and wages for employed participants
increased after program enrollment at a higher rate than the national average.
Participants completed programs quickly, taking, on average, less than two
terms to complete their first industry certification preparatory course and
approximately four terms to complete certificates and degrees.

Even
Top Students May Drop Out After Losing Aid (Inside Higher Ed)Students
are more likely to drop out of college if they lose even small amounts of
financial aid -- regardless of their grade point average -- according to a
study from the Education Advisory Board, a research and consulting firm based
in Washington. The study also found that the more financial aid a student
loses, the more likely they are to drop out.

Help
With a Heavy Lift (Community College Journal)State
Student Success Centers are supporting community colleges in many ways and
creating guided pathways in one.

Webinar:
Looking Under the Hood of Competency-Based Education
(American Institutes for Research)Highlighted
in Lumina's Daily Newsletter: Join AIR on Monday, November 7, 2016, from 2:00
p.m. to 3:00 p.m. EST to hear highlights from American Institutes for
Research's (AIR's) Study of Competency-Based Education (CBE), which examined
the relationship between CBE practices and students' learning disposition,
skills, and behaviors.

Why It
Pays to Shop Around for That MRI (The Wall Street Journal)A
growing number of employers are trying to get employees into the habit of
comparison-shopping by giving them a cut of the savings when they choose
cheaper care. Employers like the states of Kentucky and New Hampshire and
Jackson Health System, a large Florida hospital system, are using new tools
that allow workers to compare prices for common procedures like MRIs and blood
work, and get rewarded if they opt for lower-cost options.

Why
Health Care Eats More Of Your Paycheck Every Year
(The Washington Post)Millions
of Americans are finding out this month that the price of their health
insurance is going up next year — as it did this year, last year, and most of
the years before that. And it’s not just that the price is going up, it’s that
it goes up faster than wages and inflation, eating away at our ability to pay
for other things we want (beer, televisions, vacations) or need (rent, heat,
food). Does it have to be this way? Why does health care grow so much faster
than almost any other spending category so consistently? And will it ever stop?

More
Transparency in Health Care Prices Possible in N.Y. (WBFO)Understanding
your policy sometimes isn't enough. That's part of the reason why several
states have created "all-payer claims databases." These are databases
with health care price information -- what was charged for an actual procedure.
New York is about to build one.